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Vinyl

Vinyl Vault – “NZ Music”

By Audio, Music, Vinyl
Weird Culture - Weird Custom (1986)

Weird Culture – Weird Custom: National Student Radio com­pil­a­tion LP (1986)

Weird Culture – Weird Custom (1986) was, as far as I know, the first record release co-ordinated by the entire New Zealand stu­dent radio net­work. There were twelve tracks on the album, two chosen by each of the six mem­ber sta­tions.  Radio Active selec­ted the two  to rep­res­ent Wellington: cow-punk combo the Crawbilly Creeps with “A Day in Lucky Gulch” and feminist-folkies Putty in Her Hands gave us “NZ Music” which became an instant favor­ite and was oft-requested for a long time afterwards.

Putty in Her Hands were a duo con­sist­ing of Charlotte Yates and Christine Jeffs. Yates con­tin­ues to write and record, con­tinu­ing to release solo records and also put­ting togeth­er the acclaimed com­pil­a­tions of NZ poetry set to music, Baxter (2000),  Tuwhare (2008) and Ihimaera (2011).

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Back to the vinyl vault - Z.Z. Hill

By Audio, Music, Vinyl

The first of my vinyl memor­ies posts caused a tiny flurry of excite­ment so I thought I’d make it a weekly affair – as I go through the col­lec­tion decid­ing what to keep and what to flip. (Spoiler Alert: All of it!)

Back in 1983 I was lov­ing music – pretty much all of it – but I was going through a pretty enthu­si­ast­ic Northern soul phase. Thanks to a series of Kent/Modern com­pil­a­tions put out by British enthu­si­asts I was hear­ing all sorts of stir­ring stuff. I even thought for a while I might try and col­lect the whole set.

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Vinyl memories

By Audio, Music, Vinyl

I’ve been cart­ing around boxes of vinyl records from flat to flat and house to house since I was a kid. Lots of my records were bought from the plen­ti­ful record stores around the East End of London where I grew up and there­fore car­ried half way around the world when we emig­rated to New Zealand in 1986.

Recently I found myself think­ing that it might be time to finally flick these things on – they take up space on shelves and the turntable nev­er gets used. I’ve become used to lying on the couch lazily choos­ing music from my entire col­lec­tion using an iPhone as a remote con­trol. Yup, I thought – time to de-clutter a bit. But me being me, I could­n’t just take them off to a record store or thrift shop – I had to give them one last listen first.

Big mis­take. They actu­ally soun­ded quite good and I found all those memor­ies flood­ing back – flip­ping through record bins in High Street record shops, or queuing up out­side before they opened to get a highly prized new release. Stuff I haven’t done for a long time.

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